Despite some signs
that Republicans are waking up to popular support for progressive policies on
taxes, deficits and job creation, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) appears determined to
avoid engaging that support honestly. On Sean Hannity's radio show yesterday he
gave wildly dishonest depictions of President Obama's proposals while
simultaneously decrying Democratic arguments as "intellectually lazy" and 'straw
men.'

HANNITY: You pointed out something earlier: The president was
successful, he got all his plans
through.

RYAN:
Right.

HANNITY:
He got what he wanted.

RYAN:
He passed all these things.

HANNITY:
So why are they complaining, because now that didn't work, so now they're gonna
say you stopped it when in fact you didn't stop it, you couldn't stop it.

RYAN:
Couldn't stop it, and now they wanna
do stimulus which is virtually identical to the earlier stimulus bill only half
as large, yet this time with a permanent tax increase on job creators. They
wanna bring the top individual tax rate to 50 percent, and what they fail to acknowledge
is that 80 percent of all American businesses file their taxes as individuals...so their top tax rate on 80 percent of American businesses is going to go to 50
percent when countries like Canada are lowering their business tax to 15,
China's at 25. It's a recipe for
economic malaise, for managed decline, for job loss.

But Sean I guess I would go this way,
it's the ultimate straw man argument, it's a
scapegoating argument and that's why I called it an intellectually lazy
argument. Try to affix positions to your
adversaries: they want dirty air, dirty water, they don't care, or they just want the
economy to go down— these aren't positions we have, obviously. ... But the
idea here is to set up a straw man argument so you can win the debate by
default and therefore sort of nullify
the notion that there's another path forward for America, that Republicans
actually have other ideas and solutions to these problems.

Ryan's claim that Obama got everything he wanted out of
Congress in his first two years is laughable, but
he seems to actually believe that ahistorical hogwash — and the hostility to
facts doesn't stop there. His logic in claiming that Democrats would tax "80
percent of American businesses" at "a 50 percent rate" assumes that every one
of those businesses is in a top tax bracket, even though it's well established
that hardly
any are.

Note too that neither Ryan nor Hannity explains what they
believe is inaccurate about Obama's "dirtier air" line. But when Republicans
talk about blocking new regulations, revoking old ones, and even rolling back every
regulation passed since 1991, it
becomes a factual statement to say that the Republican plan would lead to
dirtier air and water. As we wrote two months ago, a single Environmental
Protection Agency regulation targeted by Republican House leadership is
estimated to prevent 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma, 1.8 million sick days,
and tens of thousands of deaths every year. You have to be either ignorant of public policy or
willing to lie through your teeth to say the "dirtier air" line is inaccurate.
And given that seconds earlier Ryan told Hannity that Democrats are pushing for
the "managed decline" of America, it's breathtaking to hear him whine about Obama "try[ing] to affix positions to
your adversaries" to win an argument.